1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the invention are related to the access of content storage systems or repositories to retrieve content when the protocols, method and location of storage, the user interface, or programming interface for accessing the content storage systems or repositories are not native to a content management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, organizations have faced an increasingly large burden of managing content. In response to this increased burden, many organizations employ a variety of content management systems in order to address specific departmental needs, house a particular department's content, or more effectively store, retrieve, index, search, edit, approve, publish, and otherwise manipulate content. These systems often are provided by different vendors, and often use a variety of proprietary and sometimes incompatible user interfaces, application programming interfaces, and data access protocols and methods for accessing content. In light of the foregoing, multi-departmental organizations can have difficulty sharing content between and among departments, even within one organization. Accessing content outside of an organization may be even more difficult.
Content management systems have typically responded to this need by attempting to natively support a number of content retrieval methods, interfaces, and protocols. Providing native support for every retrieval method, interface, and protocol, however, often costs significant resources, including development time and money. These costs impede developers' ability to natively support a wide-range of methods, interfaces, and protocols. As a result, content management systems are most likely to natively support well-known and widely-used methods, interfaces, and protocols for accessing content, such as, for example, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”). Even very expensive content management systems are less likely to support methods, interfaces, and protocols that are proprietary, less well-known, not widely-used, or the like.
In addition, many organizations store vast amounts of content. For a variety of reasons, content management systems may not want to natively access these content repositories. Content repositories that cannot be natively accessed by a content management system because they are accessible only through methods, interfaces, and protocols not supported by the content management system are referred to herein as “non-compatible content repositories,” or “external content repositories.” Note that the phrase “external content repository,” as used herein, is equivalent to “non-compatible data repository,” and has no reference to a geographical, logical, or any other location of any particular content. An “external content repository” may, for example, be located within the same computer that also houses the content management system for which the repository is “non-compatible.” To access content stored on non-compatible repositories, organizations often convert or import the content to native repositories such that they may access that content. Such conversion or importation, however, may be time-consuming, expensive, and otherwise unwanted. For example, organizations with terabytes of content stored on proprietary legacy systems or repositories may not have the resources to transfer that content to a native repository. “Legacy” systems or content include their broadest ordinary meaning and include those applications or content in which a company has already invested considerable time and money.
Compounding the foregoing problems and drawbacks is that many organizations still want to access such legacy repositories and legacy content using legacy applications that will continue to be employed for various tasks, such as accounting, customer tracking, other proprietary systems, or the like. Under these circumstances, importation of content may not even be an option as the content needs to remain available to these legacy systems.
The foregoing drawbacks and difficulties may deter many organizations from pursuing either conversion or importation. Therefore, such organizations may have some content accessible to some automated systems, while other content remains usable only to legacy systems.